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Cricket was always a salve for Melie Kerr. But when she began struggling with her mental health, time away from the game was the best response. Now, back at the crease, the White Ferns star is helping others with her honesty, writes James Borrowdale.

PHOTOS: SIA DUFF

Her body carries the memory of childhood to the bowling crease: the fading evening light of a carless outer-Wellington culde-sac, the father perched behind the stumps, an accidental discovery. But this, more than a decade later, is the 2022 World Cup, a match the White Ferns need to win. Melie Kerr – then 21 but alreadya White Fern for five years – is the team’s best bowler, called on to arrest South Africa’s cruise to victory.

She starts inconspicuously, but the fifth ball invites Laura Wolvaardt to move across her stumps to glance it fine. It pitches on middle-leg, straightens, and beats the falling blade of South Africa’s best batter to trap her leg before. It is a catalyst. “Leg spinners pose problems much like love,” wrote poet Alan Ross, and every remaining ball of Kerr’s spell – three overs, two wickets – is loaded with the enchanting threat of cricket’s most difficult art, executed under enormous pressure. But Kerr has always been the kind of cricketer onto whose shoulders falls the responsibility of the big moment.

“If I’m batting or bowling,” she says, “I want to change the game, change the momentum.” A game that was dead had come alive, and though the White Ferns lost in the final over, whenever Kerr was at the top of her mark, instead of merely spinning a ball, she seemed to be spinning the game to her will.

‘I looked dead inside and it’s how I felt’

It was remarkable she was spinning anything at all. Midway through 2020 Kerr noticed things had gone terribly amiss in her brain, and that cricket had become a crutch distracting her from the increasingly voluble voices in her head. She started seeing a psychologist, and was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, struggling through the 2020 Women’s Big Bash League for the Brisbane Heat in a Covid-bubble that kept her worried family locked on the wrong side of the Tasman. She got home, her state of mind improving over the summer, and felt herself in a “pretty good place”. But as 2021 wore on, and a broken finger kept her from training, she tumbled into an even worse crisis, whose nadir came as she prepared for a winter White Ferns camp. The anguish was a thousand times worse than anything she had experienced.

“There was this voice in my head screaming at me,” she remembers. “I felt like my body had been taken over and I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t sleeping… It just became this hole I felt I couldn’t get out of.

It was continuous, it was intense.” No-one, other than a couple of close confidantes, including fellow Wellington White Fern Maddy Green, knew the extent of her pain.

Inside her disordered mind the Christchurch camp loomed as a salve. Cricket was never the cause of her mental health struggles; it was the one area of her life that remained unaffected, “where my brain stopped and I knew what I needed to do – hitting a ball, bowling a ball”. She arrived in Christchurch late at night with an early-morning gym session to contemplate the following day. Suddenly, it was too much. “I don’t know how I can physically function or cope any more. I just don’t know how I can face another day,” was all she remembers happening in her mind. “I looked dead inside and that is how I felt.” Green stepped in, alerting the New Zealand Cricket hierarchy to the crisis. The nex tda y, she was flying – Green beside her – back to Wellington.

Kerr was delivered into the arms of those closest to her. A “family intervention” culminated in a speech by Kerr’s father, Robbie. It was the first time she’d seen him cry. Kerr prizes family –“m y people” – above all else. “That was the real turning point for me… I have

That was the REAL TURNING POINT for me... I have to get better FOR MY FAMILY because I saw how broken they were.

t o ge t better for my family becau seIsa w how broken the yw ere.” The next day she spent 12 hours with the crisis team at Wellington Hospital. She started seeing a ps ychologist and psychiatrist ever yw eek and got her medication sorted. She moved back home t o be enveloped in the care of whānau – al ways sleeping ne xtt o someone, no car. She made herself unavailable for the 2021 White Ferns tour of England, insisting the true reasons for her withdrawal be made clear. The ne xtt ime she pulled on the black jerse yw ouldn’t be until a series against India that preceded the World Cup. Back in a good place, runs and wickets came as if b y birthright. For Robbie, the hard work of her on-going recovery had been “absolutely inspiring”.

Surprise secret weapon

Perhaps no adult sportsperson is as connected to their childhood as closely asabo wler, whose intuitive idiosyncrasies when they first start performing this unnatural whirling of arms might be the point of difference that propels them into the game. When a 10-year-old Kerr tossed a few careless leg-breaks towards Robbie – a former Wellington cricketer and captain of the New Zealand indoor team – as he crouched on the Taw as treet, he kne wt here was something there. “I said, ‘You better bow lafe w more of those.’”

“Tha tw as how it all started,” Kerr, no w 22 ,sa y s. “By accident.” When, at abo utt he same time, Kerr first saw the White Ferns on TV – the last-ball loss to Australia in the final of the 2010 T20 World Cup, Sophie Devine driving the final ball of the game for wha tw ould have been a score-tying four, only for the bowler to deflect it with her foot – her course was set. Nothing permeates a person’s sense of themselv es q uite like the idols of childhood, especially as, in the cricketing milieu of the Kerr household, Devine was also Kerr’s babysitter. “I just lived and breathed every moment of that game,” Kerr remembers.

She immediately set herself the goal of becoming a White Fern b yt he age of 18, writing it on a piece of paper that survives in the family archives. She credits t he e xample of her family –herm um, Jo Murray is a former Wellington player and the daught erof1 3-test Black Cap Bruce Murray – with the work ethic that stretched the days t ob ursting with cricket. Robbie remembers the days beginning, at his daughter’s urging, a tt he local nets, throwing countless balls her way before school. He recruited spin-bowling and batting coach Ivan Tissera to work with Kerr – that action has remained basicall yu nchanged since he first saw it 1 2y ears ago, Tissera says.

Her greates tw eapon came by surprise. She was 12, playing indoor cricket and bowled what she though tw as a legbreak, onl yt o wat chi t “spin back and hi tt heg uy on the body .I turned around and looked at Dad, so shocked, that Isp u ni tt heo ther way.” She had discovered the wrong-un, a ball that, delivered from the back of the hand, spins in the opposite direction. When her wrist strengthened she learned to deliv eri t a tw ill, and has made opponents look foolish ever since. Even Tissera can no longer pick it from Kerr’s hand. “She just laughs at me, ‘I go ty ou.’”

At 14 she debuted for Wellington. The year after that, aged 15 and with the 2017 ODI World Cu pon the horizon, she asked Robbie if he thought she could make the White Ferns squad. “He was like, ‘You are a real outside chance.’” Kerr remembers answering that she wanted t obe that outside chance, a player taken along for t he e xperience of touring, even if she never played. Of course, she did better than that. At 16– two years ahead of her self-imposed timeline – she made her international debut. Ten wicket sinse ven matches against Pakistan and Australia were enough t o ge t her on the plane to England. She play ede very match of the tournament, and was the team’s equal-highes tw icke tt aker.

Tissera remembers her as a youngster, anxious to prove herself. “She’d alway ssa y ,‘I wan tt oba tw ith Suzie Bates, I am good enough, I can bat number three, I can bat number four.’” Given a chance to open, in her 20th ODI, she broke the record for the highest score in women’s ODI cricket, unseating Australian legend Belinda Clark in scoring 232 not out; then she took five wickets. She is now entrenched at number three, coming in behind an opening combination of childhood heroes, Devine and Bates. Kerr is an automatic pick on the basis of either of her skills – her ODI batting average is a shade under 40, with the ball she averages 27.5 – let

If I’m BATTING OR BOWLING, I want to CHANGE THE GAME, change the MOMENTUM.

alone both. Already a leader in the team, there seems little doubt she will one day captain the side.

Making a real difference

Kerr spoke to Sunday from the midst of the 2022 edition of the Women’s Big Bash League in Australia. She knows time away from home can trigger lapses in her mental health, but a contingent of 15 family members had recently visited, and her older sister Jess – a White Fern, too – is also in the Brisbane squad. Mentally, she says, she is in a good place, even if “there’s still a heaviness that I hold with me from these emotions that I’ve had”.

She is determined to put those experiences to good use. “I hope that by sharing my story it can provide hope for someone else out there and help others feel less alone,” she says. That instinct drove the production of Treading Water, a series made in collaboration with mental health charity I Am Hope and film-maker Hamish Johns. Beginning with her own story, each episode of the eight-part series, presented by Kerr, focuses on a different individual’s mental health journey – among them, a former top-class runner burned out by the grind, a childhood friend whose brother committed suicide, Robbie and his experience of watching a daughter suffer. The stories, Kerr says, “show that we are all human and we all go through stuff but that there is hope and you can get better”. She calls it “the best thing” she has done in her life.

Robbie, interviewed by his daughter for the third episode, told Sunday that “a huge number of people” had contacted him, not only about his daughter’s story, but also about his candid recall of what a mental health crisis looks like from the perspective of a parent. “I just had a text about 10 minutes before you rang from a local Tawa dad saying, ‘I’ve had similar things going on and this has really, really helped me, thank you.’” For Robbie, Treading Water ranks far higher than anything his daughter has done on the cricket field. “Scoring 100 or taking five wickets is fine, but it’s not life-changing for people… This is making a real difference.” For Kerr that is where her passion lies: using her platform to make an impact on people’s lives.

For now, though, the foundations of that platform need tending. A series of three T20s and three ODIs against Bangladesh gets underway on Friday in Christchurch. There’s also the T20 World Cup to look forward to in South Africa early next year, and the long-awaited first edition of the Women’s Indian Premier League following on its heels. After that, there is The Hundred in England. Driven by the engine of T20 cricket, there is more female cricket than ever – to the extent, says Heath Mills of the New Zealand Cricket Players Association (NZCPA), in a bitter acknowledgement of progress, they are now having conversations about overworked female players, conversations that have long surrounded the men’s game.

Kerr is just grateful to have come into the game after its long-delayed full professionalisation had commenced, not least because of the support – from New Zealand Cricket and from the NZCPA – that wrapped around her when she needed it, which mightn’t have been as readily available to her amateur forebears. “It’s an amazing time to come into the women’s game and I guess I’ve just been born in the right era. It’s awesome to see the growth of women’s cricket.”

WE ARE ALL HUMAN

and we all go through stuff but

THERE IS HOPE

and YOU CAN

GET BETTER.

NAU MAI / WELCOME

en-nz

2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

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